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One of those is pre-death and the other is near-death. I don't see how either suggests that there's some ghost-brain that functions after death.

Black holes are a good example of information destruction. Matter and energy fall into the gravity well, and eventually are reemited as Hawking radiation, but as far as current theories go, there's no way to reconstruct the information that made up the original matter or energy from that radiation.

Information isn't a "thing" but the relationship between, and exact quantum state of, things. Once that state is disrupted, the information is gone.

The thing is your story seems more to confirm the scientific consensus around consciousness as connected to the physical existence of the brain. You describe how ancient medicine functioned through trial and error. Some times they came up with stuff that worked, more often than not they didn't, and they had no way of knowing why a cure worked until scientific progress had discovered the underlying explanations for it. So when they found a cure that just happened to work on a certain disease, they would apply it for all sorts of diseases, or lacking proper diagnosis, would mistake other diseases for the disease it worked on and so forth.

It was blind chance without any actual useful theory behind it. Now we have useful theory which explains why consciousness would be linked to the physical cognitive functions of a brain, and less and less that would explain how it could exist without it.

I can see why you'd draw those comparisons to "spontaneous generation" or "God of the Gaps" -- it's a common misconception when people first encounter the idea of emergence. However, that's not quite what Emergentism, especially in the context of consciousness, is suggesting.

The key difference is that emergent properties aren't truely "spontaneous" or without a basis in the underlying components. Instead, they arise from complex interactions between those components, often in ways that are not easily predictable from studying the individual parts alone.

Think of it like this:

• Water's wetness: A single H2O molecule isn't wet. Wetness emerges from the collective behavior and interactions of many water molecules. We don't say wetness is "spontaneous generation" of a property, but rather a property of the system.
• A hurricane: A hurricane is a complex, self-organizing system with emergent properties like its destructive power and eye. These properties aren't found in individual air molecules or even small air currents; they emerge from the large-scale interactions of atmospheric conditions.

In the context of consciousness, an emergentist perspective suggests that consciousness isn't located in a single neuron or even a small group of neurons, but rather emerges from the intricate network activity and complex interactions of billions of neurons in the brain. It's not about throwing our hands up and saying 'it just happens.' It's about recognizing that complexity can give rise to novel properties that aren't reducible to the sum of their parts.

The challenge isn't a lack of evidence that something is happening (we clearly observe consciousness), but rather the difficulty in fully understanding and mapping the incredibly complex mechanisms that lead to this emergent phenomenon. It's an active area of research, and while we don't have all the answers, it's a far cry from "God of the Gaps" because it proposes a naturalistic, albeit complex, explanation rather than invoking something supernatural.

While theories like Orch-OR offer a different approach, many neuroscientists find the emergentist framework more consistent with how complex systems behave in other areas of science.

It's not similar to "god of the gaps" at all, as I'm not inserting anything inside of that gap. I have no fucking clue what's causing it to emerge, and I probably never will. Rather than saying "I don't know what's causing lightning so it must be Zeus," I'm saying "I don't know what's causing lightning, but I can see it's coming from the sky." Or in this case, I have no idea what's causing us to experience consciousness, but it seems to be a result of our brain.

And I see no evidence for the idea that consciousness can even exist outside of the brain, nor that an afterlife exists.